Her father bought her a plane ticket to Argentina and a Mini DV camera she would use by herself (no crew). She filmed the parents in their homes. No interviews, she assured them. Just the house and the stuff and the faces. She showed up each day and quietly filmed everything. But they knew why she was there, why she was interested. So sometimes they did talk, they alluded, they justified themselves to her. Meadow discovered that she didn’t need to ask questions. The camera on a person was itself an interrogation. She stayed with them, and they grew more comfortable. They wanted her to understand. She accrued hours of footage. It was creepily banal, the kids in New York and the “parents” in Argentina talking about ordinary things: the daily routine, plans for holidays, memories of family vacations. Or not talking. Maria’s false father, Colonel Raúl Suárez, who was rumored to have been involved in the infamous “death flights,” showed Meadow his woodworking studio. He was making a bookshelf. He appeared to be an affable, harmless fifty-year-old father and husband. As he worked, he would sometimes speak in slow, careful Spanish, which Meadow mostly understood. He told stupid jokes. He recited poetry. And he talked about how to make perfect dovetail joints. She indulged him, appeared to find him fascinating, and eventually, after many hours of this, he talked about the war years. Obliquely: “that time” and “those people.” Pronouns not names. His sound reasons. His long-cultivated justification. His unimpeachable actions and his unstained conscience. He was free to speak, as the Ley de Punto Final had cleared all but the top junta actors from prosecution. Then came an almost confession, right into the camera: he was proud that the junta had cleared the country of insurgents, and the children of those people got a second chance, a chance to be raised by patriots. Suárez was so calm about it all, and he believed in his own righteousness. She found no gap in his story, no niggle of regret or guilt. He said he was a loving father. He looked the part, acted it, believed it. He could point to the good he had done. Meadow found it riveting: what machines of comforting delusions we humans are. Our language, our words, our ever treading minds and interior thoughts, all of these to make an architecture of lies that even we almost believe. No wonder the world is such a mean place, each of us judging one another without seeing our own terrible cruelties.
Back in New York, Kyle and Meadow watched the footage, and Meadow felt a bit sickened by it. Her movie, Children of the Disappeared, was coming together in a most peculiar way. Not didactically essayed. She inflected nothing, judged nothing. The problem, she felt, was that documentary filmmakers could watch their subjects the way an American watched the distant world’s traumas on television. Watching but not engaging. Very happy with the distance between, very happy with the power and privilege of not getting too involved. Content with pointing out the horrors of people so far from each of us.
To overcome this problem, she thought she should be unobtrusive and flat, not pointed, no obvious juxtapositions of Dirty War statistics with bland home life. No easy ironies so we can hate the perpetrators from a great distance. She did this not because she had been given the trust of these monstrous people, these cold-blooded murderers and kidnappers. But because she wanted the human everydayness, their non-monstrousness to come through. She wanted the contradiction, the tension, to be clear: they participated in a horrible regime and they loved their stolen children. This made her feel very uncomfortable, which she thought was the right feeling. She let Kyle do a lot of the work as she started to feel numb toward the film. Inured to all of it. She hadn’t felt that way making a film before.
One afternoon she slipped off to Union Square. She walked to the Village East Cinema by herself, and she bought a ticket to see Girl School, Carrie’s feature film. It had been out for weeks and Meadow hadn’t seen it yet. She was catching the second show of the day on a Monday. Only a few people were in the audience, but she gathered that the film was doing very well. The “funniest film of the summer” was what the Times said. Or at least that was what was quoted on the poster outside.
She wasn’t in the right state of mind to see Carrie’s light comedy. She could feel her resistance, and she could see the setup for each joke, each pratfall, coming before it happened. It was, on its own terms, well done. Its ambition — to make a raunchy school comedy about women — was fully realized.
Meadow couldn’t wait until it finished and she slipped out before the end. She walked down the street and came to a stop. She turned back toward the theater. What was wrong with her? Why was she like this, so ungenerous? On a different day — or maybe a different time in her life — she would have laughed and gotten lost in the fun of Carrie’s film. Carrie’s perfect, playful comedy. Meadow stood there, unmoving, and lifted her glasses to wipe her eyes. Her stingy tears. What kind of person had she become, and why couldn’t she be better?
CARRIE GOES TO THE MOVIES
There were reasons, very reasonable reasons, they had not been as close. Meadow was hard to connect with on the phone, Meadow was cold sometimes, you had to be right in front of Meadow for her to engage with you. Some people were like that, but it just felt sad to realize that you hadn’t been in touch with your best friend, and in fact Carrie had closer friends if you looked at her current life. Carrie had heard nothing about Meadow’s new film until she got the invitation to the screening of Inward Operator. Carrie should have called more, but it was hard to keep up with anyone. She barely remembered to talk to Will on some days. Twelve-hour days in production. Nearly the same in postproduction. She now had a chance to make a big studio film with a real budget and well-known actors. She had been very busy, but she was determined to make it to Meadow’s screening and she did.
It was being shown as part of documentary film festival at the Walter Reade. The place was packed, and she didn’t see Meadow. Carrie sat in the dark, and she wondered if Meadow had seen her film, Girl School. She worried that Meadow had seen the film and didn’t like it, and that’s why she hadn’t talked to her about it. After all, it wasn’t Meadow’s kind of movie. But Carrie decided that Meadow was simply too busy to go see it, and eventually she would watch it and say something. The Inward Operator promotional sheet had some quotes from Meadow: